stopped working. >> to hear the rest of jarome corsi's website visit booktv.org and search for his name and title of his book, silent no more using search box at the top of the page. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening, welcome and thank you all very much for being here tonight. we are delighted to have someone who has been here -- here meaning this store but our original location a good number of times for approaching 30 years now and for him coming to seattle, this for us, feels like having a member of the family back, he does have literal family here in seattle so that part of seattle visits and she's an author too, tony will give her the word, but lawrence has

often come, books have always had something interesting going on and he sort of in a singular way writes, has written about unique people and -- or sometimes extraordinary situations as well but often at the heart of the books unique people, try and make us seem exactly alike and something conformed and conventional and he's done this the last time he was here in seattle was just a couple of years ago with a man most known and quite well known in the world of film walter merch who -- he kept in touch. all the work he's done as film editor, one of the most,

everything. also astro physicist by heart with rogue theories and group waves passing the night, dialogue about what he was doing. he's done this in various ways and various times. tonight he's here for a book by in this case someone we have heard of and that being the late dr. zachs and this book chronicles 30-year friendship, how are you, dr. zachs in quotes, but a marvelous book that probably book about himself, also has his life, family's life in over 30 years of knowing this amazing and extraordinary man, two quick stories because he was here and books that won great acclaim and

attention, these are fairly early on and one of them was seeing voices and it's a book about deaf culture and our reading in the old store which was a pack and we knew it was going to be the case in terms of who all was coming but half of the audience was deaf and he loved that, this whole, you know, the energy that night was probable and he fed off of it and gave it back, he was quite energetic fellow. the other story was other book tour he ended up in seattle with us and it was one of those, the days before, e-mail and cell phones and all the other possible devices that track us and i got a call from a woman in new york who had helped arrange traveling around and i said, oh, yes, lovely, we had a great night. she said, yes, yes, do you know where he might be now, he had

disappeared and he was, you know, such a figure that way. has done a beautiful job, it's -- it's that best kind of human and humanely informed biography and i'm sure after the reading part of this, he'll take questions and that will feed a lot more of what should be lovely and lively conversation. we have book tv here tonight so your friends who aren't here will certainly get to see and hear you if you ask questions afterwards and that broadcast at appropriate time we will know, we will probably find out sometime soon after and following all of that, in the back to sign books of this and other books that are there as well. so with that again, we thank you very much for being here, now

please join me in giving a warm welcome to wonderful writer lawrence. [applause] >> thank you so much, thank you all for being here. maybe i will read a particular section. i'm on like a 20-day book tour and trying to read a different section every night, so if you people from c-span joined me on the tour you could have the whole book and audio. anyway, oliver zachs born in 1933, part of the class of '33, i have a theory of people born in 1933, these are people who if you think about it enter puberty

at the very end of the war, so the war is ending and they are just having the hormones kicking in and have delusions of grander and wild sexual assault and so forth and they include oliver zachs, these are all kind of the same sort of, i can give you a whole bunch more, a whole strange vitality of that particular group, he was born in '33. he had a complex and difficult life early life, he -- he had been sent to a -- both of his parents were doctors when he was 7 year's old, it's the battle of britain taking place and like all of the children of london

and especially of children of doctors he was sent to country school, horrific place which he calls bravefield, he is sent with his older brother and the treatment they received there is so horrific that breaks the older who is basically schizophrenic after that and lived up in the attic of the house when you would go to london, so oliver's father's house and oliver had had a horrific time too. his parents have no idea what to do with him and so his mother who was one of the first female surgeons in england would do things like, she was ob-gyn

surgeon and she would bring home stillborn fetuses for him to dissect and when she was 12 he took autopsy of 12-year-old who committed suicide and he had close relationship with her, she was always reading him favorite novelist which was d.h. lawrence. humanity by the way is amazing, orthodox jewish family where the mother is reading this, that makes sense, i guess, anyway, he has an extraordinary period in junior high and high school, he befriends jonathan miller, the great doctor, theater director later on and other people and

goes to college at one point, he's home from oxford and his father is out on rounds, the father says, oliver, you never talk about girls, you never bring home any girls and oliver says, dad says do you not like girls, do you like boys, he said father i'm a homosexual, please don't tell mother, it would destroy her. the next morning his mother comes tearing down the stairs and just tears into him as what he describes 3 hours of cursing, i wish you had never been born,

lacerating and lacerating and after 3 hours she falls silent, they don't talk to each other for many weeks and when they resume talking, the subject is never raised again in her lifetime but that voice is deep inside of him. he flees england as soon as he's gotten, finished his degree as a doctor from oxnard and hospital, bat out of hell, comes to california. when he told his mother that he had never been a homosexual -- when he said he was homosexual, he had never had experiences at that point, i've always thought that in earlier life he was pan sexual, when he later, i will tell you how he got to know each

other, went to museum in london we were looking at hipo preponderance >> hippotomus would make a wonderful bed partner don't you think, hipos in the mud, the mud. [laughter] >> but anyway, by this time he was 21, 22 he heads to california, and he has 3 or 4 years of a complete out existence, he's in san francisco and then in los angeles doing residencies, he's in a leather scene, on the fringes of hells angels, in hells angels he's known at dr. squat because he's

famous for squat lifting, heavy weight lifting champion, 600 pounds from a squat, he -- he is a fairly opened sexually and involved in the drug scene, he takes every single drug there is and every dose and overdoes, he's in los angeles, on a friday evening he will get on his -- he will take a milkshake of 10 times the amount of speed that would kill you, but he's strong and gets on his motorcycle and from la he motorcycles to lake and back without stopping, except for gas. you know, she goes back. and then -- and at one point he

eventually looks himself in the mirror, if i keep this up for 6 months, i will be dead and he began fairly quickly at that point to just swear off drugs and sex. by the time i met him he had been celibate for 15 years and he would be celibate for 35 years before that ended. eventually, long story, part of which i track here, he ends up and tries to be a bench scientist but he's incredible by clumsy and breaks test tubes and spent 3 years developing a collection from earth worms which he then lost, all notes of his experiments were on back of motorcycle and fell off and they

eventually kick him out. go see patients where maybe it won't cause as much damage and in fact, that was his liberation, he ends up going to a hospital for the incurrable, in 1967, '68, '69, this is what will be taking place. i will talk in a second except to say that, well, basically you remember many of you know the story from the movie if anything else that he -- that he comes upon at that point 500 people at abraham being warehoused, it's a poor house, he spent all of his time at poor houses and state institutions and so forth where he says that's where the jewels are, you have all of the time in the world and nobody is expecting anything, but he

becomes convinced that of this population of 500, 80 of them, the most see veerly -- severely afflicted are different, the alzheimer's, all sorts of patients, any number of neurologists before this and none have had this thought and goes back and researches and all seem to succumb and are different from each other and succumb to sleepy sickness. influenza which many more people died in that influenza around the world that had died in all

of world war i. of those who had survived, a few years later, particularly younger ones, people in 20's and 30's, pretty much from one minute, one moment to the next, one day to the next, simply came to halt. they froze. this was a horrendous plague like aids was talked about. it disappears for 7 years, people catching it and it is quickly forgotten, just like repressed, nobody talks about it. but all of the families have people in their lives, 30 or 40 years later are part of a wider population, he has something

about the life he's led meant that he was particularly sensitive to what a friend of his called the community of the refused, extremely distance are afflicted, anyway he spent time with them, i'm not going to talk about this too much this evening but it's in the book, at a certain point brings them together, he spends hours and hours with each of them, he has them not only they are different from the others but moral audacity to know they are completely alive inside which is a horrifying thought but indeed turns out to be the case and miracle drug for parkinson's arrives but reluctantly decides to do it and gives to patients and suddenly they come alike in

spring-like revival, which lasted a few weeks, they go from being frozen to years later i had an opportunity to talk to one of these people who is still alive in 1982, but 12 years later and i asked her, do you remember what it was like, she was kind of crumbled over at this point, do you remember what it was like when you first came too, she was like, oh, yes, i said, what was it like, frozen for 30 years and you come, well, suddenly i was talking and i said do you remember your first words, she said, oh, yes, i said, what were your first words, she said, suddenly, oh, i'm talking. [laughter] >> anyway, they went from this

into period of tribulation, they started having terrible, terrible side effects, side effects of the side effects. they just couldn't get it right. it was just bedlam and some of them didn't make it out, others subsided into a kind of accommodation. crumbled existence that was no where near as beautiful as the spring had been but not as bad as the tribulation had been and better than the previous 30 years had been. he wrote the book about that. in 1973 it was published. it is his master piece and if you read oliver and other things of oliver and not read that you have great experience positively book, amazing, amazing book and it was virtually completely ignored, it was celebrated by

the likes of frank and people like that, but doctors generally didn't believe it, i mean, it wasn't double blind, it wasn't quantitative, it was wasn't pure reviewed, it was weird thing of case studies, this is not what neurology was in those days, it was very quantitative and so forth, very rigorous, many people to the extent that doctors, they either ignored him or they just disbelieved him and then what happens is that now in '73, by the way, years later in 1982, '83 when i interviewed the publisher of awakenings, he said that the first edition had had -- the first edition of the cover had 1500 copies and had

not yet been sold through it. 10 years, 12 years. so anyway, after this, after the disappointment of this oliver does something completely dumb, and his mother, by the way, dies shortly after this and so he's really in bad shape and he goes on a walk, mountains of norway by himself without telling anyone. he has a run-in with a bull or so he says, his friends think it was probably a cow. in any case he falls off the imof a cliff, goes falling down and chatters leg, he's incredible by large, incredible by strong but just the weight of the body hitting the weight of his body hitting the leg that he

lands on chatters the leg, it's night fall and down there 8 hours and some people happened to be walking by and locate him and get help, eventually he ends up in the very hospital in england where he had been medical student in london, he has this extreme existentialist experience where the leg doesn't feel like part of his body, but it's not just that he doesn't have feeling, a foreign alien thing, tries to throw it out of his bed, he's strong and can do it and goes flying after it, he's deeply alienated and goes through infernal experience and gets better and things are fine and he gets better and better, everything is okay, he will not write a book about that, but he

is so unnerved him that nobody believes him about the other book and he begins to have neurotic feelings about this book. falls into a 10-year long writer's block. it's in the middle of all that, last 4 years, 4 years before then that i write him a letter, as i said, nobody had read that book but as it happened i went to santa cruz where somebody had read it and said you have to read this book, i didn't get around it to a few years, but when i did, so now it's 1979 or so, i wrote him a letter and i said, in the book you called the hospital mount carmel, i get the allusion of st. john of the cross, dark night of the soul, this book doesn't seem christian mystical to me, much more jewish

mystical and i get back 8-page letter from him. the place is call beth abraham, my first cousin is israeli foreign minister, by the way both of us have the same other first cousin who is al, first cousin to each other and my greatest hero is the soviet neuroscientist, psychologist who may be related 15th or 16th century. i finish my first book, i was living in la most days and rejected by a whole slew of new york publishers on the grounds this is 1980 that they loved the book it's just how can one publish a book about a california artist, an artist

named robert erwin, i moved to new york, looking more somebody else to spend time hanging out to write the next book that i decide check out robert erwin who is not known and living, 1980-81, he spends all his time in the back door of poor houses, institutions, little sisters of the poor, their homes and state institutions, things like that. and he is kind of completely stuck in this book that he's trying to write, at that point been 6 years and he's writing millions of words, just not the

right words and he can't bring it together and he's really in retrospect the 4 years when i arrived seemed to be the hinge lit years in his life, he could have easily been stuck there and we could have never heard more of him and there's this incredible struggle to bring that book to a conclusion among other things. i spent the next 4 years basically hanging out with him, i would do other things for the new yorker but when i was in town i could be sure any given night he would have anybody else that was seeing, go to dinner, 3 to 4 times a week, we would go on rounds together, which where i met the patient i described a second ago and we would go to california, i would interview many friends, jonathan miller and tom gun the poet and things like this and at certain point i got ready to write, okay, now i should write the book, happened

to be at the point where he was coming, he was at the end of 10-year block and finally the book was ready to be published and i went off for a summer and indexed my notes that i had thousands of pages of notes, index was 250 pages long and it was going to be the 3-part new yorker series that we used to have in those days. and it was 75 pages into it and he asked me to stop, basically about -- he couldn't deal with the sexuality being talked about, at that point in his life he felt that the fact that he was homosexual was the light of existence, that it was a horrifying fact, he hoped it didn't contaminate his science, he tried very hard from happening, he was celibate and

his attitude was filled with the kind of things that allowed him to empathize with other people and be part of the community, all the stuff, and i said there was no way to write, and if we didn't include that you couldn't account for the drug stuff, he had been there like that. anyway, so we agreed that i wouldn't write it, i set it aside and he said after i died, what happens, he ordered me to go back and write the book. he said now you have to write it and as i say at one point in the book, it's like having being

craft going 3500 miles an hour and going back and resulted in this book, a book that has long, it's not a biography, it has a very long introduction and the meat of the book is my account of those 4 years of what he was like during those 4 years during what i now see where the hinge years, years in which i say i was side show to quijote, immediately after ward he publishes, all the stuff that had been blocked out, he's an international best seller and becomes a completely different world, the teddy bear neurologist that we know and love and before that he was quite scattered and this is an

account for those years. so i thought and keep you in my reading something different each time that i would read you 4, 5 pages from the period when he's finally, finally getting to the end of the writing of this book and he has written so many different versions and it's just -- and this much of the book is just trying to get him to finish it and so only at this point that he's on the verge of finishing it so i will read you some passages, we are in 1983. .. ..

unaware of what was going on. years later he would be sent by robert silvers, you heard about the seeing voices a second ago. the genius of that book was robert silvers in the new york review. who had the idea that one gallaudet college somebody fell into a huge crisis because this was the college for the death and they attempted to put a hearing person as the president of the college and students rose up in a kind of belated birthday uprising and they sent oliver down there to cover it as a journalist. oliver suddenly found himself a hero among the students that he was there and they thrust a banner or poster in his hands and he led the march and it was exactly like the scene in modern times, that would later

be his only political time. he says ãberic was very interested in a political group in prep school but i was oblivious, my mind wandering instead to galvanize asian, electrostatic currents and so forth. this is in junior high school. two beats aside, despite all my agitation i had been wrapped up in my own thoughts my entire life. november 14, oliver spent the weekend in boston in the book fair next to eric's booth. eric coren was famous, to those of you ãbhe had the remainders calm for many years he was a very famous arcadian antiquarian book dealer oliver spent the weekend in boston at the book fair next to eric's booth completing the umpteenth version of his leg book

epilogue. i was an odd figure scribbling beside eric's booth with thousands mulling all about me up lately oblivious utterly absorbed as if i were sitting in a woodland glade. i do love the idea of being private and ãin public view. whereas i fall apart if i'm all alone. he said because i can't stand to be in my house, when i'm in my house, he was in a little house on city island off the bronx in new york. he said i always become off to my house. if i can get to and then i'm okay and i can write in ends in the dining room of the end. november 24 he's back from one of these trips he's an obsessive funk. i am living zeno's paradox,

zeno's paradox be paradox of if you shoot an arrow at the target, as you know the great ellie attic philosopher from the island of elias and pre-platonic pre-socratic grease. zeno talks about if you send an arrow toward his target it has to go halfway there before it can get there and has to go halfway the remaining distance and halfway the remaining distance so it never gets there. which is why of course saint sebastian didn't dive his wounds, he died of fright. anyway, using zeno's paradox omitted ellie attic frenzy i read 50 pages and 85 more, take out 10, add another 20, i write endlessly, eat obsessively and i'm sick all the while.

i have a strong feeling of two erratic impulses last few weeks. and though i may externalize it and say it's jim silberman editor at summit books, making me do it it's an internal enslavement he let loose the enormous machinery part obsessive correct creative which rises up and blots out the entire world even the world of dreams. sounds fun, i tell him. i asked oliver how things are going with bob silvers at the new york review of books where he started posting he had been publishing a tool under review before this. and what he saw it of the case study he recently sent him. he liked it though perhaps i made his life more difficult by sending him 17 more revised versions [laughter] december 3, oliver tells me about a new 70 page section of the endless epilogue entitled "the tunnel" calling it hate craft is london publisher had completely jettisoned the coaster rica version which was 200 pages long and all things that happen in the jungle of costa rica while he was there. all that damned vegetation.

[laughter] and now he was doing all new transit to gradgrind and cook town, his years in graduate school and his coke addiction.but really, he says, neurology and the soul, that's what the epilogue is about. what all my work is about. december 13 at silberman's office trying to put the god damned leg book to bed i sit in silberman's young associate editor eileen smith presents her condensation of the epilogue oliver is absolutely hopeless dealing with editors. next time, he mutters before eileen joins us on going to deal directly with the printers and sidestep publishers and editors altogether. so i'd stay on to mediate things i momentarily put in mind that passage from walter benjamin's illuminations where he is talking about cruise. the latin word text him means the web.

no one's text is more tightly woven and marcel preuss, to him nothing was tight or durable enough. ms. publisher gully well we know proofreading habits would do spare the tech centers. the galleys all went back covered with marginable notes but not a single misprint had been directed, all available space has been used to refresh tax. eileen for her part has distilled the more than 300 million but somewhat chaotic pages of oliver's most recent epilogue and addenda into a coherent 30 pages of which the first 25 are quite good. there is a flaw and page 25 that leads to five pages of flushing out the rest is okay. i start to complement in her, something oliver would never think to do. then focused quickly on the particular need to expand the contraception the portable caught if the climax of the book needs seeing and swell and

blossom so as to diffuse oliver's tendency today fuse panic. i tell oliver what is needed here is five pages, not 50, oliver, 50 would be worse than useless. i pages. then i leave them to go to work. eileen walks me to the door he isn't going to take it apart again is he? i don't know if i can handle if he takes it all apart again. it occurs to me that oliver intimidates those who hold him in all that the way to deal with him in the sort of situation is as you would an eight-year-old prodigy which is to say you need to blend and management and respect with strict paternalistic forbearance. oliver, would you just behave yourself? headmaster once sent home a report card to young oliver's parents with the following comment oliver sacks will go far if he doesn't go too far. i call all over the next

morning, how did it go? the next evening. they were there until 12:30 a.m., oh dear, you must be tired. it was just the beginning, he says, eileen had been calling the garage to make sure they stay open they said they would but i got lost getting there and by the time i did get there they were closed. i only got back in my house this morning at 7:30 a.m. what did you do in the meantime? did you go to a hotel? >> no i walked around in an ambulatory days pausing to eat dinner every hour on the hour. i need a great deal. he tells me the story at 6:00 p.m. that evening roe, carp role. i'm gobbling up a potential world of carp. a billion, trillion, the rope produced some duration of the mouth and the mind. but he seems satisfied with the final product that's not schmaltz answering some of collins misgivings who said the coaster rica version was schmaltz. there's thought there another

audible slurp overgrowth. it might be dedicated by schmaltz. he continues downing universes but my repetition he still worrying about that dam epilogue are not strictly repetition. i meet up with oliver at summit books again the next day then off to a rambling lunch at the beanstalk across the street. come pick me up at 12:30 pm he told me over the phone, by then i will have completed or if not abandon it. our conversation turns to a perennial topic of constant concern. i don't have a reverence for the text i take liberties going all the way back to awakenings but i do have reverence for the book of nature and they are i

wouldn't so much as alter a,ãbi feel the same way about myself but, but, but, this would be typical he often faded in mid monologue. one time i overheard a conversation about the one person who knew him another person who didn't and the second person said, did oliver ever talk to himself in the first person especially when he talked to you. [laughter] at which point he free associate so the question of dearness. there was an editor at harbors and asked think taker i have no doubt it was inhumanly clever but also in human period.

he objected to my calling my patients and gear as in i saw a dear old woman this afternoon. what is dear he asked me prominently? suddenly all sense of dearness flood the world and i felt i was dying in interstellar space. the next morning i was saved by a letter from maria which began my dear doctor sax. you might as well ask if arbor stroller did how can lithium carbonate be dear to one but can't and is dear to me. with me nowadays a dear is often botanical. when my leg came back i said my dear old thing your home again. it wouldn't be home wish to say dear sweet home unless potassium carbonite were exactly like potassium carbonite. that's why truthfulness is so important. which he is clearly talking about and chewing on awakenings and his anxieties about this book. which brings us back full

circle. it has something to do with fidelity too, brave field his hellhole wartime boarding school was a world of fickle relations where no one was faithful to only one and the emotional stability of the inorganic world was crucial in saving me. he says that the wall size of the natural history museum at london they had a periodic table of all the elements on the long wall and examples of each of them in the age of eight and nine and 10 he reconstructed his life looking at the wall. a pause and ernst young jones's biography of freud there's a paragraph about freud's respect for the regular fact, his faithfulness to it even if it should take years to surface. i will stop there. just giving you a sense of how

incredibly he was on a thread for those year it wasn't clear he was gonna make it out. the book finally gets published. the day the book goes to printers for good he's out walking on city island and slipped on ice and breaks his other leg. he sent him a telegram that says oliver, you would do anything for a footnote. [laughter] the book itself finally ended indeed all the other stuff that's been blocked up behind it comes pouring out and he becomes oliver who you will get to know and who will start going on tours and ends up at places like this. you yell stop there and open it up to questions and so forth.

the book basically focuses those four years and then the last 70 pages are the ensuing 35 to 40 years in which becomes the godfather of my daughter and then after 35 years of celibacy finally allows himself to fall in love. i should rephrase that, he was falling in love constantly. and being fallen in love with even more often he wouldn't allow it. finally seven years before he died he had a death scare with cancer of the eyeball which he survives and somehow allowed him to fall in love. my daughter by then was 20 she's a little bit older and he was like a teenager. he was giddy.

all aflutter it was just amazing. my daughter would mother him through this but for all of us we just saw the knots come undone and it was beautiful and indeed that's the cancer that seven years later mustache decided to his liver and that he lived six months and dies. nails the landing beautiful slow death, which i talk about in the book too. incredibly productive at the end. that's the book. questions? yes in the back. >> be loud! that was good. >> when i first saw your book because. [inaudible question]

>> it's interesting, billy hayes indeed wrote a very beautiful memoir called insomniac city. billy hayes is the writer who became his lover. and the two of them were besotted with each other at the end all the way through. it's kind of a besotted memoir. i don't contradict i don't argue with any of it. and everything you know that's wonderful about oliver is wonderful that was him having said that, up until now i feel like this is the first attempt to portray oliver in fall

because in addition to being all that, he was in terribly complicated person he was could be a monster. he suffered the narcissism of all tourism. you never knew who was coming to dinner, he could be incredibly rude. he was incredibly self-involved. and yet with his patients he was totally there. and i think to my mind that makes all the good stuff all the more amazing. to see him rustling. this is really a period in his life where he was wildly neurotic. to see him in a certain sense for my favorite things somebody wrote me about afterwards is

that this is in the biography where there is a kind of teleology this is a book where you get to see oliver happen. when we would go on rounds he would often say that he was a clinical oncologist if you think about aesthetics as a philosophy of beauty and the symbology of the philosophy of knowledge, ontology is the philosophy of being, what it's like to be or what being is. for oliver, he would say this, be diagnostic question is how are you? to these people at the rim of extremity. what is it like to be you? how do you be? what this book i try to turn that question back on him because he wasn't just a teddy bear and he wasn't just the but

somberly lovely person that billy talks about although he was back in their world. he was absolutely tortured and had lived an incredibly difficult life when he himself tells the story late in his life he tells it from the perspective of serenity. he was not serene. he was tortured and for that person to be the person who all of you know and that not to be an act, he was that other person too to me it's more powerful if you have a sense of what was at stake and what he had to fight his way through to get there which in turn is part of why he was so extraordinarily good at seeing other people fight you your things. >> it's an amazing good story. one part i don't understand is part of his torture about being homosexual. he was in san francisco in the

early 70s and enjoying it and then for 30 years he celibate? >>. >> okay the part is, how is it possible how is all this possible the one party doesn't understand is his homophobia i guess you could say. indeed it was such an interesting experience during those first four years that we were together he very slowly approached it and then pulled away and then revealed a little bit more and then gradually he would reveal the full catastrophe of this horrific fact about himself. i came from california i grew up in la. i'd be like oliver nobody cares. you know nobody cares. it's not only that he was in san francisco for those few years but that he lived a few blocks from stonewall when stonewall happened in 1969 but

that was the very summer of awakenings. that was the summer when the springlike awakening had turned into tribulation for those three months and he was at the hospital 22 hours a day and slept at the hospital. he completely missed it. he would say to me sometimes, you remind me of my shrink. by the way, he was an analysis two or three times a week for 50 years with the same man. as he said toward the end, i think we are getting somewhere. but his analyst would say, oliver, you are the least affected by gay liberation of anybody i've ever met. i would say similar things to him and he would say, no, i sit in my prison cell, the door flung open the gate flung open the doors of the prison flung open and i listen to the dancing outside but i stay in my cell.

he would often quote grace paley extraordinary line that every person real or invented deserves the open destiny of life. he would talk about what his interest was in the world of his patients was the intersection of faith and freedom. in the everybody's life no matter what the extremity, was an open book. i would say yes, oliver, and yours too he would say no everybody's life is an open book except my sexuality wishes a closed book as closed as close can be. that goes back. at the time you get to the point where the mother lays it on him, it really you have a sense of that as the voice inside of him that just keeps lacerating him it's not just a random voice is the voice of the person he was closest to in the world. in many ways.

>> was he religious? >> was he religious? his parents were orthodox jewish, i think that by the way was a voice condemning him it was precisely, he called it the deuterocanonical i would call it litigant. the part of judaism he did love was friday nights when his mother would light the candles. saturday was all prohibitions but friday was the sabbath. he would return to that. he gave this extraordinary lecture which i talk about a great deal on the book omni neurology of the soul. at the end somebody raised their hands and said what you think of the afterlife of the soul? he said i can make nothing of that concept, i am precisely fascinated i am compelled by

the embodiment of the soul. he was asked do you believe in god, he said i believe in the divine. i believe in grace, the grace of fluid movement. but he was not himself, he was deeply at some level ãtuned to his jewishness but he wasn't religious he certainly he would've been on the agnostic side his religion if anything was darwinism. and as such he was very much opposed to the scientism of much of what neurology was practiced when he was starting there. when it turned completely to charts and double-blind experiments and so forth. when it was all about the disease people had rather than

people who had the disease. he was trying to do a neurology of identity which if you think about is almost contradiction in terms. how can you do a science of the individual? but that's what he was into. he was into the infinite expanse inside every individual patient he met which was not what ãbi should mention that on his last birthday when people knew he was dying, there was a party for him and the head of neurology at columbia university got up and said that nowadays, this is three years ago, four years ago, nowadays at the columbia neurology department and the medical school of those who apply for residencies in the wall ology after they get there medical diploma, 70% mentioned oliver sacks. that's the transformation he

made. what he met for so many different kinds of patients, he almost single-handedly changed medicine. a generational shift he brought about. >> he mentioned his love of mozart and mendelson, two of the most sensitive intimate it in their way complex composes of all. it's a fascinating connection there. >> he mentions the love of mozart and mendelson in particular also box by the way. and how intimate and complex they both are. he would play he would talk regularly about music within the context of people who work on music, parkinsonian patients and how he could bring them back with music. he would talk about how the

thing about music is that it moves you and you move with it him music was extremely important to him. much more so then certainly then film. he was dense when it came to popular culture. one day he called me up and said, i've been dealing with this guy who he is about 40 years old but he had a blow and stuck at the age of 22 and all he talks about is his rock group he just loved. i said he said but i can't ãb i can't get the name i'm writing about him i need the name. i said what you think? i think it's the happy corpses. i said the grateful dead? he said that's it! but then he became very close with mickey hart. they had this proconsul neurological interest together. there you go.

>> had a question about just your friendship with him and what was it like when you first started spending more time with him as a subject of a piece that you intended to write. i'm just curious at what point you realize it was a friendship. it sounds like he was fairly forthcoming with information during the interviews that were not actually things he wanted to be written about. i'm just curious about that dynamic.>> he at one point, this was long before. if i think what i did musically on playing the piece in everyone's that have these grace notes i do that kind of anticipate things are going to come. at one point he says to me we were talking about his sexuality and how he celibate and he says, i regularly fall in love with straight men whose daughters i become the godfather four. [laughter] i'm a fairly unusual reporter.

in which i have no problem having very intense friendships with the people i'm writing about and maintaining them as friends afterwards. that was certainly two of robert irwin. the thought that i was part of the herculean effort to get them out of the right is what i edited large portions we were all talking to each other and so forth, it's not your typical writer subject relationship. another thing generally about my writing with all my writing i don't do interviews like q&a's. we have conversations. so if i were to tape it which i didn't do, half the conversation would be me. i would be telling long stories about things robert irwin would set. i have no problem doing that because you get different responses than you do if you just stand there and do q&a. nobody's ever done a q&a with

oliver sacks, which is 20 minutes of describing what robert irwin makes of perceptual issues and so forth. so we were just great friends and then all the more so he literally at the crucial moments says i've lived a life wrapped ãcorrected inhibition and i'm not going to end it now. can we just be friends? and we stay close friends and he was a great godfather by the way. anything else? thank you all so much for coming. [applause] and i will be back there, i guess. come and talk to me. [inaudible background conversations]